It's only 24 hours away from the S 4 launch and Samsung is well and truly in the spotlight. Few people would deny that the Korean company is exerting a lot of pressure on Apple, and Apple until recently was the world's best tech company.

Apple's fall from grace is a topic for another day but just before the S 4 launch, let's return to how Samsung became so innovative.

At the heart of the system is eye-tracking software, making this agreement central to the future of display and user interaction.

Eye scroll is expected to be a major feature of the new S IV.

Samsung is seen as a particularly important catch for Russia, in part because it helps with the patenting of Russian science. On the exploitation side Samsung recently agreed to open a lab at the new Skolkovo tech hub outside Moscow. According to East-West Digital News:

In the remarks he delivered at the official signing ceremony at Moscow’s Samsung Gallery earlier this week, Skolkovo’s President Viktor Vekselberg said that he views Samsung’s move an “historic event of exceptional importance.”

Russia is currently negotiating a 40 year gas supply deal to South Korea (who recently began importing Russian oil) in exchange for technological modernization and investment of the type that Samsung offers.

Have the Russians helped Samsung to develop eye-scroll? I'll come back to that later. From what I can tell there is no trace of any market leader in eye-tracking being a partner of Samsung, which points to an in-house, lab-based solution. At least nobody is admitting it this side of the S4 launch.

Indeed it is doubtful that the technology exists in the form people have been talking about, another point I will come back to.

Yet Russian science is helping Samsung to take a large step into the next generation of 3D screens and displays. Eye-scroll is a good example of Samsung's move into software-driven innovations and it is central to how 3D will work. The future is looking good but without the support of low-cost Russian science, and its Russian connections, would Samsung have progressed to the forward edge so quickly? I doubt it.